its reach, and the song is saved once again. And it goes on being saved again and again and again in all the pauses, long and short, of the song each of us is singing.
The poet asks that we do not define him as the rushing around that we see him doing, but that we should define him as the pause between the events to which and from which we see him rushing; because it is precisely during the pause that the quality of the notes, and his true life, is born.
The poet asks us to be, like him, the rest between the notes: that brief, measured moment between the time when one note of the music stops and another begins. Without that rest, all would be chaotic racket. “Death”—that is, distraction and forgetting— would dominate when all you fill your life with are the notes. All notes and no rests would be Babel. The sound would not be music; it would be more like a siren. But in the “reconciliation” of that “dark interval,” the song “goes on, beautiful” because it's there that all the notes become organized and melodic. It is there that they take on meaning and give value.
Here's a practical example for noticing the rests between the notes: You've jumped into your car after dropping off a package at the post office and are on your way to an appointment. You're thinking of what you just did or what you will soon have to do. Dropping off the package and your appointment are your “notes.” You do those well. You are busy getting the notes right. But what you likely miss is the right-now, the in-between, the time between the notes, the time in the car when you are going from one thing to another. That's the time I want you to notice. That's the time the poet calls valuable.
Pianist Artur Schnabel, in speaking of his music, makes this point exactly: “The notes I handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses between the notes—ah, that is where art resides!” It is also where the art of living resides and where we transform discordant noise into the music of our lives.
Stopping is taking notice of the space between the notes. Stopping is making the space between the notes important. Stopping is transforming the space between the notes into life-giving waking up and remembering.
Beyond living and dreamingthere is something more important:waking up.
ANTONIO MACHADO Times Alone (Translated by Robert Bly)
10
Stopped: Awake and Remembering
Picture a lone traveler on a journey, paused at a fork in the road, considering the moment, fully awake, poised, not rushed, aware of his or her power, and, only when the time is right, choosing the road and continuing the journey. A decision thus made cannot be wrong. The journey will be successful, whatever its outcome. The pilgrim is awake and recalls the answers to the important questions of life.
Now imagine another traveler stumbling down the road, frantic with anxiety, unfocused, dropping things along the way, unable to distinguish accurate directions from false ones, tattered, exhausted and, without thought, taking the fork in the road that's the closest. Not an appealing model nor one we would choose to imitate. Yet most of us do. Racing from thing to thing or from note to note, in a frantic attempt to keep up or to catch up, we lose our keys, our plane ticket, our date book, ourselves.
Here is an example from my college years: It was at Georgetown University, 1955. So taken up was I with the shouts of “revolt!” that I walked boldly out of class one day with hundreds of freshmen, practically our entire class. I have now forgotten what the intended revolt was about, some perceived inequality no doubt, but we were clearly serious. We had organized the revolt, kept it secret, and then screamed it to the world as we marched onto the football field, daring university officialdom to oppose us.
Then Joe Rock appeared out of nowhere. He was a 250-pound Jesuit priest—most of it belly—with a snarl calculated to induce terror and immediate submission into the heart of any faint-hearted freshman. He lectured us for fifteen minutes with studied gesticulations and barely controlled roars. I can still hear his voice: “There will be no revolt! I'll give you three reasons why there will be no revolt!” Joe Rock always had three reasons for everything even though we were convinced he was thinking up the second and third as he was expounding the first. It was during his “three-reason” lecture that I remembered something: I am not a revolutionary, don't really want to be a revolutionary, and would make a lousy revolutionary.
I had hit the ground running, I had begun this revolt without being awake or mindful. In no way was I Stopped. Neither, it seemed, were my cohorts. We were simply caught up in the heat of the moment. So Joe Rock's posturing easily worked. In fact, I was thinking during his lecture, “He's right, this is silly, this makes no sense at all. . . .” Some revolutionary.
Being awake—knowing who you are—and paying attention to what is going on both inside and outside of you, is close to what the Eastern spiritual traditions call mindfulness. It involves being very present to this moment, to what you are now doing, to this feeling, and to this person in front of you. It is what newspaper columnist Adair Lara means when she relays the story of what her mother wanted on her birthday, “presence not presents.” It is noticing the tone of someone's voice and their body language, as well as noticing those things in yourself. It is seeing the many things that occur in your day and quickly establishing whether they are important or trivial. It is tuning in to other people and yourself. Being awake is a very in-the-moment act; an act of right now. It is the opposite of being distracted and unfocused.
Stopping brings you awake and aware of the present moment. But it also helps you bring together the threads of your history, of your stories. It helps you to remember who you are, where you come from, where you are going, and where you want to go; to remember your original goals, ideals, and dreams; and to remember why you started doing what you do so that you can see if that's still what you want to do. Even if you have no clear answers for many of the big questions of life, it is vital to continue to remember what your questions are. Losing your questions is truly losing your way.
Stopping is also remembering in a more literal sense: remembering. That is, to collect again all the parts of you that have been left behind or scattered about in your hurry and to get all your “members” back again into a cohesive whole. The poet Robert Bly speaks of the “bag we drag behind us” as full of those parts that we have lost the use of—our innocence, our spontaneity, or our playfulness. Stopping is reclaiming those parts we did not want to lose, the parts that were stuffed in the bag, maybe years ago, and are hidden and forgotten.
These two gems, awake and remembering, are the essential elements of Stopping.
Carpe diem!
HORACE, Odes
11
Stop and Go for It!
Stopping is simple to understand. It's a period of time spent doing nothing in order to gain everything. It's taking enough time and creating enough quietude so that you can remember the important questions of your life as well as the current answers that you are bringing to them.
Stopping is a girl sitting in a sun-filled windowseat gently stroking her purring cat, a woman with an open book in her lap gazing out the window and into a distant world, a man walking barefoot along an isolated beach feeling the wind in his face, a driver poised at a stoplight taking a deep breath and relaxing with a soothing thought rather than just wishing for the light to change, a busy nurse taking a one-minute breather and then smiling at her nasty patient, and a salesman mindfully eating his lunch while sitting on a park bench and looking at the sky.
Inherent
